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Thursday, February 18, 2016

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Health App Reviews Not Trustworthy to Users and Providers, Study Shows

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC Davis Medical School recently published a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. The researchers found that healthcare application reviews are not trustworthy for caregivers, patients, or consumers. They are better off relying on personal and clinical judgment when choosing a mobile app to use. The authors advise consumers to conduct their own research while taking into account reviews and feedback. In the United States, there is no formal review or evaluation process for mobile health applications in the public or private sectors. According to the research, there are over 165,000 mHealth apps currently available on the market; few have undergone extensive quality review with no standardized review process. MIT announced last year that it is planning on issuing reviews of connected medical devices. mHealth services and apps were researched by Harvard University physicians and experts from MIT's Hacking Medicine Institute.



The study, sought to determine which measures for evaluating the quality of mHealth apps have the greatest interrater reliability, by identifying 22 measures for evaluating the quality of apps from the literature. A panel of six reviewers reviewed the top 10 depression apps and 10 smoking cessation apps from the Apple iTunes App Store on these measures.

Beacon Program Highlights Challenges and EHR Adoption

A program sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) offers insight into how communities effectively utilize HIT and EHR adoption in order to achieve the triple aim of better care at better costs, leading to overall better care. At the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, researchers found that many communities faced similar challenges that healthcare systems face in adopting HIT. The report, released back in November, shows that most hospitals in each Beacon Community faced typical technological issues, including interoperability and infrastructure development and integration. Financial concerns hit smaller providers especially hard.

In order to overcome the hardships, some organizations developed a four-pronged strategy as explained in the report:

  • Meeting clinical performance metrics to help physicians conduct quality improvement;
  • Extracting data from their EHRs;
  • Collecting and harmonizing data across disparate EHR systems;
  • Using third-party aggregation platforms to collect data and provide reports

Data sharing was of particular concern due to legal and policy limitations. Moving forward, Beacon Communities determined three overarching lessons for EHR and health IT adopters.

  • The programs showed that healthcare organizations need to quickly address IT issues, and uses the resolutions to help providers see patient-centered value in the technology;
  • Leaders and executives need to be present in helping providers and patients buy into the process;
  • Organizations should align efforts with past initiatives to show value and continuity to key stakeholders, such as providers and patients

Upcoming Events:



Join eHI at HIMSS! March 2 in Las Vegas! Click HERE to Register.



Policy Working Group Meeting. Thursday, February 25 at 2pm. 


 



Faces of eHI:



Brian Kelly, President, Payer & Provider Solutions, Quintiles

 

 

Changes Proposed to NIST Cybersecurity Framework

In 2014, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) promulgated their cybersecurity framework as a response to Executive order 13636. Last December saw NIST request comments from industry as to how useful it is to industry. Comments were due by February 9. In a joint letter, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security (AEHIS) call the framework important, but also call it “one piece of a larger effort around risk management" and not "a full solution for addressing it."



Both groups add that questions remains as to how much is enough when it comes to risk analysis and management. Providers continue to be challenged with managing security while simultaneously juggling other priorities. The groups suggested the following:

  • More education is needed for providers about the framework and how to implement it;
  • Better steps need to be highlighted when it comes to protecting data at rest, especially apart from encryption--which won't keep data safe in all cases;
  • The tiers were useful for measuring cybersecurity programs against other organization's plans;
  • The HIPAA security rules’ lack of prescriptive approaches for managing risk limits use of the framework

Tuesday, President Obama signed two executive orders establishing groups of stakeholders to issue federal recommendations for cybersecurity and privacy priorities. HHS is to serve on the privacy council, with the cybersecurity council membership to be made up of both public and private sector interests.

HHS Adds Guidance for App Developers Attempting to Navigate HIPAA

The Office of Civil Rights at HHS published additional guidance to provide developers with different scenarios that HIPAA may apply to the data the app collects. OCR Director, Jocelyn Samuels, wrote in a blog post, “We hope these new scenarios will help developers determine how federal regulations might apply to products they are building; we also hope they will reduce some of the uncertainty that can be a barrier to innovation.” OCR offered up six scenarios that answer two HIPAA questions:

  1. How HIPAA applies to health information that a patient creates, manages, and organizes in a health app, and
  2. Explain when an app developer should comply with HIPAA

For instance, in the first scenario: “Consumer downloads a health app to her smartphone. She populates it with her own information. For example, the consumer inputs blood glucose levels and blood pressure readings she obtained herself using home health equipment.”

The ORC says that in this case, the app developer is not a business associate because the consumer is uploading health information to the app without the involvement of health care providers.

 

Online Tools Can Boost Patient Wellness in the Workplace

Activity trackers and internet-based platform use to promote exercise as a part of corporate workplace wellness can motivate employees to be more active, in a new study. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, reveals that user engagement levels rose when employees used a fitness tracker and the Walkadoo platform in a goal-oriented effort to be more active. Utilizing the tools, including the online portal, participants were able to assess their status of steps and goals. The authors, from Georgetown University, involved 265 employees in a control group and a treatment group. Treatment group members were given access to the Walkadoo platform, while control group members were left to their own devices for a six-week study period.



Researchers found that the treatment group significantly increased their steps compared to the control group. "Our findings add to the evidence that physical activity interventions can be effective in the workplace where employees tend to sit at their desks for long periods," the study's authors say. "This program was effective despite not being designed specifically or exclusively for workplace implementations." Providers are also utilizing these new technologies. Carolinas HealthCare System deployed a mobile app that collects patient data earlier in the year.



The study notes that while adaptive walking intervention reaped positive results, more study is still needed.

In Case YOU MISSED IT

 

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The Payment Reform Landscape: How Does Telehealth Fit into a High-Value Purchasing Strategy?



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